Good Reads

Don’t you sometimes sit down with a book, pour yourself a glass of wine or a mug of tea, and just feel&#8212unbearably smug? It’s okay, I do it too: it’s normal to display (a little too ostentatiously) that you are reading “Ulysses” on the subway, while your fellow passengers dig into AM New York. You’re doing your small part to hold off the contemporary world’s tidal wave of ignorance and illiteracy and baseness and you deserve a little pat on the back, you warrior. But, if you want to do real good while reading, you can pick up Profile Books’ forthcoming series “Ox-Tales.” The set of four books, which came out last summer in England to laudatory reviews, features a total of thirty-eight original short stories, extracts from novels-in-progress, and (one) poem by authors like Zoë Heller, Hanif Kureishi, Geoff Dyer, Hari Kunzru, John Le Carré, and Lionel Shriver. All royalties go to Oxfam and each of the volumes is themed around a key area of Oxfam’s work: water projects (water), areas of war and conflict (fire), agricultural development (earth), and climate change (air). But, like any good literary work, you don’t need to get all these allusions to enjoy the books: the ox might as well refer to the burly animal, the books’ themes to the four seasons, and the cutely colorful covers to their contents. The stories stand on their own.